I shook my head. “I have no idea.”
“What did Brass say?” she asked.
“That it would be a good idea to go look at this apartment. The method, he said, would be dictated by circumstance. He did suggest that a five-dollar bill might work wonders.”
“Well, let us hope so.
“If not you can practice your histrionics. Few men can resist a crying woman.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “They do what she wants just to shut her up. Is Pearly Gates going to join us?”
“No. Since we don’t know what’s going on, Brass thought that the less your putative stepfather knew about your mother’s past, until and unless she chooses to tell him, the better.”
Sandra nodded. “Well then,” she said.
“Just so,” I agreed.
We pulled up to the corner of 80th Street and Park Avenue, and Thomas Jefferson Finkle turned around and opened the glass panel. “Okay, sport, we’re here,” he said. “That’ll be forty cents.”
I handed him two quarters and a dime. “No, no, don’t thank me,” I told him. “I’m a big fan of Clifford Odets.”
“Whatever,” he said, pocketing the money.
Nine-ten Park Avenue was a quiet, unassuming twelve-story building on the southwest corner of 80th Street. The doorman’s uniform was hardly as ornate as that of a captain in, say, the Italian navy. “Good morning,” he said, holding the taxi door for us. “May I help you?”
I paused until the door was closed and the cab had driven off. “I believe Mrs. Phillippa Gates lives here,” I said.
He cocked his head thoughtfully. “Mrs. Phillippa—”
“You probably know her as Mrs. Stern,” I suggested.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Of course. Mrs. Stern. I’m sorry but Mrs. Stern is not in residence at the moment.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” he said, looking offended. “But I can ring her apartment if you like.”
“We would appreciate it,” Sandra said.
“Of course. Follow me.”
We entered the lobby and the doorman went to the house switchboard, which sat in a small alcove between the two elevators. After a few manipulations with the earpiece to his ear, he unplugged it and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “Mrs. Stern doesn’t answer.”
“How long has she been away?” I asked.
“Sorry, I couldn’t tell you that.”
“Did she leave word as to where she was going?”
He shook his head. “Sorry.”
I leaned forward. “Are you sure that she is not in the apartment?”
He looked at me with the patient, exasperated look that Parisians reserve for American tourists. “I just rang—”
I palmed a five-spot, preparing to pass it to him. “We’d like to go up and see,” I told him.
He shook his head. “That would be irregular. The super wouldn’t allow it.”
“Have you asked him?”
“As a matter of fact, Mr., ah, Gates, was here on Saturday and, as we haven’t formally been advised of the new, ah, relationship, the super didn’t let him upstairs.”
I put the bill back in my pocket. If he wouldn’t take Pearly’s money, he wouldn’t take mine. “Can’t be too careful,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” he agreed.
“Are you sure there’s nobody up there?” Sandra asked, looking concerned and slightly tearful. “Supposing that Mother broke her leg or had an attack or something. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had an attack. She may be just laying up there alone!”
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
I stepped closer to him and spoke earnestly. “Have you looked into the apartment, say anytime in the past week?”
He drew back. “Of course not!”
“Are you certain that Mrs. Stern isn’t lying on the floor in the living room, or the bedroom, unconscious—in need of medical help?”
“Well, sir, that’s highly unlikely. After all—”
I interrupted him. “This lady is her daughter, she’s very worried. She hasn’t heard from her mother in some time, and we can’t get an answer on the phone. We’d like to go upstairs and look around, make sure she’s all right.”
The doorman looked doubtful. “You can ask the superintendent,” he said, “but I’m sure he wouldn’t allow it.”
“Will you call the superintendent for us?” I asked.
“I’m sorry. He isn’t in at the moment.”
Sandra’s eyes got wide and a note of hysteria crept into her voice. “Mother might be upstairs, lying unconscious,” she cried, wringing her hands, which I thought was overdoing it, but she’s the actress. “Or worse! I have to get to her! What are we to do?” She dissolved into sobs.
I patted her gently on the back. “Perhaps we should call the police,” I suggested. “I imagine a policeman could open the door for us. Just to look around, make sure Mrs. Stern is all right. I just hope it doesn’t upset the other tenants, to see policemen in the building. But that can’t be helped.” I gestured toward the plug board. “Is this the outside line?”
The doorman had taken a step back, as one might retreat from someone carrying the plague. “No, sir, it is not. This is the house phone only. The central switchboard is in the superintendent’s apartment.”
“But if he isn’t here…?”
“His wife and another lady operate the switchboard,” the doorman told us. “One of them is always at the board.”
“Admirable,” I said. “You wait here,” I told Sandra. “I’ll go out and find a policeman.”
“Wait!” the doorman said. “We wouldn’t want—It wouldn’t be—You just wait here for a minute. Please!” He touched the call button for the elevator on the left, and shifted from foot to foot until it arrived. After a whispered colloquy with the elevator man, they changed places, and the doorman entered the elevator while the elevator man stood by the door and tried not to stare at us. The elevator door closed and it groaned and whined and started up.
Sandra clutched my arm and, bringing her sobbing face close to mine, she whispered, “I need a drink!”
I patted her on the shoulder. “Be brave,” I said loudly and firmly.
After a couple of minutes the elevator returned, whining and groaning, and thumped to a stop and the door opened. A tall, slender man emerged. He was dressed in a tweed suit and Ascot and carrying a walking stick of some dark wood with a gold handle in the shape of an owl. His dark hair was graying at the temples, but his carefully trimmed mustache and beard were still jet-black. He was past middle age, but how much past I couldn’t say. He was wearing steel-rimmed glasses. If he was introduced as the president of a bank, or a sporting club, or a small European country, I would believe it.
“Now then,” he said in a smooth, reasonable voice, looking from Sandra to me and back. “What’s all this?”
“We’d like to see Mrs. Stern or Mrs. Gates, whichever you prefer,” I told him. “Who are you?”
“My name is Colonel Wills. You’ve been feeding Bernard here with some cock-and-bull story about poor Mrs. Stern lying unconscious in her apartment. And this young lady claims to be her daughter, when I happen to know she has no daughter. I want an explanation. And, by God, if anyone around here is going to call the police, it shall be I!”
Sandra was looking at Wills with a funny expression on her face. She took a handkerchief from her purse and dried her eyes. “Your name is Colonel Wills?” she asked.
He nodded. “That’s right, young lady.”
Sandra nervously clutched at the strand of pearls that circled her neck. “Couldn’t you help us? I just want to make sure that my mother, Mrs. Stern, is okay.”
He peered at her over his glasses. “That’s all, eh?”
“Do you live here?” Sandra asked, twisting the pearl strand between her fingers. “Perhaps we should go up to your apartment to talk this over.”
“Well,” he said. “Well.” He looked at me and back at Sandra. She
dropped her hands to her side and stared intently at his face. He smiled. “Perhaps we should.”
Now if that don’t beat all, as my childhood buddies back in Ohio would have said. He had changed his tune quicker than Kay Kyser, and I was nonplussed at his sudden acquiescence. But Sandra and the colonel seemed to be plussed, so I kept quiet.
He gestured us into the elevator. The doorman and elevator man switched places again, and we went up.
The apartment was large and could have been the stage setting for an elegant drawing-room comedy. The furniture was antique, but not overpowering and, if I’m any judge, cost a bundle. But, of course, I’m no judge. The colonel waved us into the living room, which was mostly shades of white, and we sat down on an el of a couch. The colonel sat on the right-angle section and propped his feet up on the coffee table.
“Well?” he said.
“I could use a drink,” Sandra said.
“Silly me,” the colonel said, “I’m forgetting my manners.” He pushed a small gold button on the end table, and a real-live butler appeared at a side door and stood motionless.
“What will you have?” the colonel asked.
“A martini,” Sandra said.
“Scotch and water,” I said. It would have been churlish to refuse.
The butler disappeared back through the door.
“Nice place,” I said.
“I like it,” the colonel replied.
The drinks came. Colonel Wills was drinking something green with club soda. “All right,” he said after taking a sip. “You gave me the office, now tell me the tale. What’s the pitch? What do you want?”
“You don’t recognize me?” Sandra asked.
“No,” he said. “Should I?”
“I was smaller the last time you saw me.”
“No doubt,” he said, unimpressed.
Sandra smiled and put her hand lightly on my arm. “This is Morgan DeWitt,” she told the colonel. “He works for Alexander Brass, the columnist. They are helping me find my mother.” Twisting in her seat she indicated the colonel with an upturned palm. “Morgan, this is the Grand Duke Feodore Alexandrovitch, or Manderson Kent of the Shropshire Kents, or Leopold van Spottsbergen, or Astor K. Vandermier, or Captain Sander Biddell, United States Navy, Retired, or…”
The colonel with the many names put his glass on the table with a thump and rose to his feet. “Now look—” he said.
Sandra rose with him. “Better known to those who love him as the Professor,” she finished. “Professor, I’m Lucille—Amber’s kid.”
He stared at her.
“Really,” she said.
“No!” he sat down. “Well, I’ll be—Little Lucille. Say—remember that time in Sheboygan—”
“We were never in Sheboygan,” she told him.
“I guess you’re right. Remember the Fisher brothers, Jim and Alec?”
“You mean Peter and his sister Sal?”
“Was that their names? Remember the big score we made running the golden wire on that grain elevator bates from St. Louis? Rented a private railroad car for that one. Had him running around the country and took him for twenty thousand dollars, then we blew him off with a cackle bladder in Buffalo, New York.”
“The mark was from Cleveland, he owned a dry-goods store, we took him for closer to thirty thousand, and we blew him off in Jersey City. But you got the cackle bladder right. Mom always said we had more luck that we deserved on that one.”
“Well,” the Professor said. “I guess it is you.”
“I guess it is,” she agreed.
“It’s nice to see you, kid. The last time you came around you were—what?—thirteen?”
“I think so. Maybe fourteen.”
“Then you got high-hat on your mom and moved out, the way she tells it.”
“That’s pretty close.”
“You always had a mind of your own,” the Professor said, raising his glass with the green liquid. “To you, my dear, and to your mom.”
“Thanks,” she said, touching his glass with her own.
I took a sip of my scotch. “So,” I said, “you’re the Professor. It’s good to meet you.” I looked from one to the other. “I’ve heard a lot about you, what with this and that.”
The Professor leaned forward and stared at me as though he wanted to memorize my face, and then he leaned back. “Is he with it?” he asked Sandra.
“His boss is,” Sandra said.
“Alexander Brass,” the Professor said. “I know him. I could like him if I took the time. He is with it.”
“With what?” I demanded.
“The con,” Sandra explained. “The grift. The Professor wants to know if you’re one of us—of them.”
“Boy, you could make a fortune in the grift,” the Professor told me, continuing to examine my face. “I haven’t seen anybody with such an innocent-looking phiz since Sweet Billy McFine left the business.”
“I thought I looked jaded and hard,” I said. “I’m disappointed.”
“Not much call for jaded and hard,” the Professor said. “Innocent will take you far.”
Sandra took the Professor’s hand and squeezed it in her fist like a small child clinging to her daddy. “Where’s my mom?” she asked.
“Honey, I wish I knew,” the Professor told her. “She hasn’t been around here for more than two weeks.”
“Straight?”
“Straight. She was working this cowboy mark, using the apartment right below this one for the convincer. We keep it here for such purposes. Very elegant and posh, it is. We were setting him up for a golden wire store, ’cause he thinks he knows about horses, being from Texas, when she decides she’s in love with him and ups and marries him. Well, if it were anyone but Mary I would have thought she was working a con of her own, and been real unhappy. But I know she’s on the up and up, and we’re not out much sugar, so what the hell. Then she goes away.”
“I thought you’d be retired by now, living on that land you own in Florida,” Sandra said.
“Ah, my child, I went to visit that portion of Florida to which I have title in fee simple, as it were, and discovered that the fee was not the only thing that was simple. The land is underwater at high tide. Likewise at low tide. It is, to put it concisely, a swamp.”
“You were swindled?” Sandra asked incredulously.
“Is there no bottom to the depths of human depravity to which some people will sink? Yes, I was had.”
“What did you do?” I asked, picturing a gunfight at ten paces on the streets of Coral Gables.
“I sold the property for three times what I paid for it; but that’s not the point. The event taught me a great lesson.”
“Which was?”
“When you go up against a real estate salesman wear both belt and braces, and keep your wallet in a buttoned pocket; they make gritting seem honest and respectable by comparison.”
“So you’re still at the game?” Sandra asked.
“Like Harry Lauder, I’m making my fourth and last farewell performance,” the Professor said.
“How’d you rope Mom back into it?”
“It was a sort of mutual lassoing,” the Professor said. “We were having dinner together one night and we got to talking over old times. And we decided to give it one more spin, just for the hell of it.”
“You mean you talked Mom into it.”
“I suppose she missed the thrill of the chase. Like an old fire horse answering the bell one last time—”
“You mean you talked Mom into it.”
The Professor sighed. “Yes, I suppose I did.”
“Mom is not old,” Sandra said.
“It was just a simile. Mary is assuredly not old. It is I for whom the bells of age are tolling.”
“You’re not old, either, Professor. And you won’t be too old when you’re a hundred and twenty—dead or alive,” Sandra told him.
“Thank you, my dear. But, is that right? You have no idea where your mother is?”
/> Sandra nodded and looked glum.
“That’s right, Professor,” I told him. “We’ve been looking for her for the past week. Didn’t you see the mention in ‘Brass Tacks’?”
“Brass’s newspaper column? I saw it. Doesn’t mean I believed it. Unlike Will Rogers, I know nothing whatever that I’ve read in the papers.”
“Weren’t you concerned when Mom disappeared?” Sandra asked.
“No, child. You see, I had no idea she had really disappeared. I assumed she was off with her new husband and hadn’t bothered informing her pals on the Street.”
“But when he came here looking for her?”
“I thought perhaps they had had a spat. I wasn’t prepared to discuss with him anything that Mary might not have already told him, and I had no idea of just how much that might be. There are some things, I think, that she wouldn’t wish him to know.”
“That’s so,” she agreed.
The Professor looked at me. “May I assume that nothing of what we say here will get printed in Mr. Brass’s column?”
“Nothing that we hear from you will get used in a column without your permission unless we hear it from someone else. And even then we probably wouldn’t use it. As the boss says, if we couldn’t keep secrets, we wouldn’t hear any.”
“Understand then that you have my blanket non-permission to ever print anything you hear from me. Ever,” the Professor repeated. “Any time.”
“I understand,” I told him.
“You know,” the Professor said thoughtfully, turning back to Sandra, “there was another man around asking for your mom a few days ago.”
“When?” I asked.
“Who?” Sandra asked.
“Manders, the super, told me about it,” the Professor explained. “The man didn’t exactly ask for Mary, he said he was here to pick up her bags. He had a note.”
I sat up. “Did Manders give him the bags?”
“There were no bags to give, as far as I know. Mary kept very little stuff of her own here. A change of clothes, perhaps; clean underthings. He didn’t give the office, and Manders thought it sounded funny, so he told the man to have Mary call the building and explain what she wanted. She never called.”
The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes Page 13
